The Bavarian Forest became the location of Germany's first national park on October 7, 1970. Today it occupies more than 24,000 hectares along the border between the German state of Bavaria and the Czech Republic. The park boasts some 350 kilometers of marked hiking trails and over 200 kilometers of bike paths that allow access to the forest reserve. It also contains a broad range of flora and fauna (around 11,000 species in total), from the rare mountain tassel flower to restored predators like lynx and wolves. Significantly, over 75% of the land in the park is now classified as “natural zones,” where the park administration preserves the wilderness in line with the principle of “Natur Natur sein lassen,” a phrase coined by its former director, Hans Biebelriether, in 1991.
The Bavarian Forest National Park celebrated its 50th birthday in 2020, a bad year for celebrations. While the public commemoration of this anniversary had to be cancelled due to the global pandemic, the Minister-President of Bavaria offered some consolation by announcing that the park would soon expand by 600 hectares. Meanwhile, the number of visitors continued to grow, forcing park rangers to take new measures to preserve the nature that lockdown-weary urbanites increasingly craved. That tension between the imperatives of accessibility and preservation is just one of the issues addressed by this edited collection published during the same year. Urwald der Bayern is the first critical and comprehensive discussion of the past, present, and future of the Bavarian Forest National Park. Published with support from the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, the volume celebrates the park's five decades while also shedding light on its contentious development and growth. As editors Marco Heurich and Christof Mauch state in the volume's excellent introduction, the different contributors “show how precarious and unstable the national park project is over the long term while making it clear that not only humans, but also nature . . . can influence the course of human history” (29).
After that introduction and a foreword by Franz Leibl, the current director of the Bavarian Forest National Park Administration, the volume is divided into four sections with sixteen chapters in total. The authors represent a variety of scholarly fields, including history, cultural studies, philosophy, geography, ecology, biology, and philosophy. Of special interest to readers of this journal are the essays in the first two sections, “Geschichte und Politik” and “Kulturelle Perspektiven,” which cover the historical origins, management, and reception of the Bavarian Forest National Park. Highlights include historian Maximilian Stuprich's chapter, which details earlier German efforts to protect the natural environment during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the process, he questions prevailing views about Nazi environmental policy by demonstrating how the Third Reich built on the foundations already established by the Verein Naturschutzpark, just as it used “the cloak of nature conservation” to validate its imperialist plans (46). In contrast, historian Bernhard Gißibl provides an international perspective on the origins of what he describes as Germany's first Transnationalpark. His chapter examines the transatlantic and European prototypes and precedents for the Bavarian Forest National Park (not to mention the debate surrounding the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania) while also noting that its creation was closely linked to developments across the Czech border.
Shifting the focus from inception to reception, ethnographer Christian Binder takes a look at the local population of the Bavarian Forest, considering their traditional relationship with the natural environment before analyzing their response to the national park. At first, the so-called Waldler were hardly enthusiastic, with some disparaging the park administration and its work with loaded accusations of “Ökofaschismus” (106). This antipathy faded over time, as a younger generation incorporated the national park into their new vision of Heimat. Offering additional insights to historians of tourism, geographer Marius Mayer helps to explain the broader acceptance of the national park by investigating its economic impact. An analytical model revolving around “opportunity costs,” “indirect costs,” and “direct costs” allows him to conclude that the region “clearly benefits from the protected area” (158). Not only does the national park employ twice as many people as the state forest service would; it has also generated secondary businesses like restaurants, inns, souvenir stands, and even the brewing of Nationalparkbier.
One issue that appears in several chapters across the four sections of this edited collection is the debate around bark beetles, an aggressive insect that feeds and breeds between the bark and trunks of trees, often killing them in the process. During the early 1990s, Borkenkäfer descended upon spruce groves in the Lusen district, initially targeting old and sick trees. Soon enough, the infestation spread in the direction of the Rachel district, where the bark beetles killed many spruce trees at high altitudes. In the end, 7,000 hectares of forest lay devastated. In her chapter on nature protection across the Iron Curtain, historian Pavla Šimková notes that the administrations of the Bavarian Forest National Park and Šumava National Park in the Czech Republic disagreed on how to handle this existential threat. While the Czech administration adhered to traditional forestry principles by felling trees infested with bark beetles, the Bavarian administration gave new meaning to the motto of “Natur Natur sein lassen” by letting the dead trees stand and allowing the forest to regenerate naturally. Not everyone agreed with this policy, as confirmed by Wolfgang Scherzinger, a zoologist who worked for the national park during its early years. In his chapter titled “The Winding Path to the ‘New Primeval Forest’,” he addresses the protests of the late 1990s, when residents of the region registered their discontent with the park administration and Hans Bibelriether in particular. In short, the loss of the forest portended the loss of tourism, jobs, and a specific vision of Heimat. According to philosopher Christina Pinsdorf, the devastation of the Bavarian Forest was also an unwelcome manifestation of Immanuel Kant's notion of the sublime; whereas the boundless mass of silvery-blue trunks evoked the mathematical sublime, humanity's helplessness in the face of catastrophe evoked the dynamical sublime. In their chapter concentrating on the aftermath of the infestation, geographers Martin Müller and Nadja Imhof reflect on both the symbolic and the political significance of the landscape's sudden transformation. Highlighting official efforts to reconceptualize the “Waldfriedhof” as a “Waldwildnis,” they explain how it was possible for some to reimagine the bark beetle as a “creator of new forests,” capable of revealing the “authenticity of nature” to modern humans (119).
This well-curated and -illustrated volume is a model of interdisciplinary debate, demonstrating how scholars from a variety of fields can broaden our understanding of a particular place and its history. Like any edited collection, however, it has its issues. One could argue that the quality of chapters varies across the four sections, with some providing more robust analysis or greater attention to the Bavarian Forest National Park than others. In the end, however, the insights the volume imparts outweigh any superficial complaints about its consistency.
